Nothing imminent for WAC

As a policy, I bend over backwards to avoid addressing anything posted on message boards, Facebook or Twitter as 99 percent of it turns out to be bogus.

But after getting a couple of questions about this assertion that the Western Athletic Conference will announce new members on Monday, and the fact that I hadn’t made any recent rounds — thank you, recruiting — I decided to dig into it.

Short story even shorter, two senior sources in the conference told me pretty definitively that it’s B.S.

Unfortunately, this being a basketball Saturday, that’s about all I got. There was a tidbit that Benson outlined the political details of the Montana/Montana State partnership in his last e-mail. But again, hard information is pretty scant at this point.

People are playing this next phase of the WAC’s improvement project much, much closer to the belt then they did with the UTSA/Texas State addition. Probably because that was such a no-brainer, talking about it didn’t matter much. But by comparison, this is like unravelling the Watergate break-in.

The way it looks to me is that commissioner Karl Benson is trying to be as sound and thorough — and quiet — as possible. Having seen his league pushed to the brink of dissolution in the past year, he knows this next step will be essential toward ensuring its future.

Or accelerating its demise, if things don’t work out.

As such, it looks like everything’s being explored from the top down, with school presidents being heavily involved and athletic directors serving more in advisory roles. There’s absolutely nothing unusual about that, but that and the extreme secrecy does underscore that Benson knows he can either make or break his league in the coming months depending on what schools he can — and can’t — attract.